It’s already pretty well known how much Hollywood loves sequels, especially nowadays, and there are several reasons for that. The biggest one is simple: all it takes is for a movie to be successful for a follow-up to immediately get the green light, sometimes without anyone stopping to ask whether the idea actually makes sense. A lot of the time, it works: The Godfather Part II, Terminator 2, Top Gun: Maverick, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and so on. But there are some cases where anyone can clearly see how unnecessary the sequel was. There may have been good intentions behind it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the story was already complete and it would’ve been better to leave well enough alone.
And the craziest part is when the sequel only comes out many years later. It’s an insane attempt to convince a new generation of audiences to care about something that had already been left in the past. To give you a better idea, we’ve put together 5 movies that got a second installment and fit exactly into the category we’re talking about.
Ridley Scott delivered a masterpiece with Gladiator, so much so that it’s still hard to watch the movie and think there was anything missing from the story. It already has revenge, betrayal, fights, and most importantly, a definitive conclusion for Maximus (Russell Crowe), a Roman general betrayed by Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). From there, he loses his family, is sold into slavery, and ends up becoming a gladiator specifically so he can get close to the man responsible for destroying his life. In the end, Maximus gets his revenge and even makes sure Rome has a new future. And yet, the filmmaker decided to try a sequel more than 20 years later.
In Gladiator II, we meet Lucius (Paul Mescal), the adult son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and Maximus, who, after being captured and taken to the arena, begins to develop an increasingly strong connection to his father’s legacy. And that’s the point: the sequel does find a reasonable reason to continue the story without just resurrecting the protagonist from the original, but the very existence of the movie makes it feel like someone looked at a perfectly self-contained classic and thought it would be a great idea to try and squeeze something else out of it. The new chapter is good; it just doesn’t come close to the first one, and by the time you finish watching it, you’re left wondering why they even made it.
There’s a pretty big problem here because this is the classic case of trying to make a follow-up without the main element that made the original a success. When you start Son of the Mask, you immediately see that Jim Carrey and his character Stanley Ipkiss aren’t in the cast, and the story actually follows Tim Avery (Jamie Kennedy), a cartoonist who finds the Mask and ends up having a son with powers similar to those of the artifact. You try to watch it while not really understanding what the production’s plan was, since the appeal of the original is clearly not there. If you remove the protagonist who made The Mask a hit and change the approach to a comedy about a superpowered baby, what exactly is being continued?
Some sequels simply decide to go in a direction that’s really complicated to explain. Son of the Mask, naturally, couldn’t repeat the success of the first feature and made around $60 million worldwide, falling well short of what was needed to justify its $84 million budget. It’s understandable that they even tried to bring Carrey back, but after he turned it down, they decided to test out this new plot when maybe it would’ve been better to never even consider getting the idea off the ground. It’s a completely different movie.
One of the most classic comedies of the 2000s, Zoolander is a film that seems like it was made to never have a sequel in the first place. Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) was already a complete joke: an absurdly vain male model, completely out of touch with reality, and convinced that his career means much more than it actually does. And the story puts him in the middle of a conspiracy to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia, while he competes with his rival Hansel (Owen Wilson) and tries to figure out if he still has any relevance in the fashion world. In other words, it’s an absurd and specific enough premise to work just once. However, Zoolander No. 2 came 15 years later.
The sequel has Derek and Hansel trying to get their old careers back while investigating a series of celebrity murders. And here there’s an important difference between a movie that got a sequel and a movie that needed a sequel. The original had become a cult classic over the years, but that doesn’t automatically mean audiences were waiting for another one. As a result, the second feature relies heavily on cameos, references to the first movie, and tries to recreate the same jokes, as if more than a decade apart was enough to turn an old idea into a new one. The answer? It wasn’t.
With Sin City, you can defend it a little because at least there was material to call for another movie. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean people were actually waiting for it, right? The original adapted several stories from Frank Miller’s graphic novels and brought to the screen a world of corrupt cops, criminals, prostitutes, assassins, and antiheroes in a black-and-white Basin City. But the thing that worked so well here was that it functioned as a collection of interconnected stories, and precisely because of that, it felt perfectly capable of ending there. Then, a few years passed, and they decided to return to that world with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.
The second movie adapts the comic book story of the same name and mixes that material with new narratives involving characters like Dwight (Clive Owen), Nancy (Jessica Alba), and Marv (Mickey Rourke). Was it good? Not really. The biggest appeal of the original was the whole package: the story, the visual impact, and the concept. Back in the 2000s, Sin City felt like something totally new, and almost 10 years later, it didn’t feel new anymore. So, the experience of watching A Dame to Kill For is pretty mediocre, as it was essentially an attempt to go back to a formula that no longer had the same impact. There wasn’t really any urgency or need for another film.
This case is almost scary since you’re taking a bona fide classic that had absolutely nothing left to tell, yet the determination to make another one seemed to be too strong. In Grease, Danny (John Travolta) and Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) meet, fall in love, spend most of the movie trying to figure out how to make their relationship work, and finally end up together at graduation — that’s it. There’s no big mystery about the characters’ futures that needs to be solved in another film. So when a sequel came just a few years later, it didn’t make much sense at all (and it’s not exactly a surprise that people barely remember it).
In Grease 2, the story returns to Rydell High to do what? Pretty much everything all over again, just with different characters. The story centers on Stephanie Zinone (Michelle Pfeiffer), the new leader of the Pink Ladies, while Michael (Maxwell Caulfield) is a British student who tries to win her over by taking on the identity of a mysterious motorcycle rider. From a commercial standpoint, it’s obviously easy to understand the decision; after all, the first movie had been a massive phenomenon. The problem is that repeating the formula isn’t the same thing as repeating the hit. A lot of Grease‘s appeal came from its songs, but especially from its cast, and the sequel didn’t have Travolta and Newton-John, let alone the fresh feel that helped make the original a classic. In the end, the production bombed at the box office, making just over $15 million.
You can stream these sequels… if you want.
